Daughter has made it to the Oscar awards shortlist

Daughter (Dcera), an animated drama made by Daria Kashcheeva, a student of the Department of Animated film of FAMU in coproduction with MAUR film, has made it to the Oscar awards shortlist in the Animated Short film category along with nine other animated short films. Of those, the final five will be nominated on 13 January 2020 and they will compete for the Academy Award. We are immensely honoured to have Daughter on the shortlist along with another Czech film, director Václav Marhoul’s The Painted Bird (Nabarvené ptáče), which made it to the International Feature Film shortlist.

At this point, we are not really sure what else we could tell you about Daria Kashcheeva’s deeply emotional film. You might be interested in the truly admirable listing of prizes that the animated film has received to date – you can find it here.
Maybe we could mention that the Student Oscar, one of the greatest awards of all, was bestowed on Daria Kashcheeva by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this October. We will never forget the moment when our Czech team came to Los Angeles this October to take part in the official Student Academy Award ceremony and the academy members asked us: “Did you enter Daughter in the Oscar Awards? It is one of our favourites!”

Still, here is an interesting piece of information: the working title for Daughter was The Bird (Ptáče) but the author decided to change it just before completion. In the past, Daughter and The Painted Bird both appeared at the Toronto International Film Festival.

All of us will keep our fingers crossed as we watch in suspense the official announcement of the Oscar nominations in January 2020: the last time that FAMU was awaiting this moment was in 2017 when director Jan Saska’s Happy End had made it to the shortlist in the Animated Short Film category.

We owe huge thanks to the Czech Film Fund without whose support Daughter could never be made.